Magnificent Desolation

by Buzz Aldrin

  Rumors continued to swirl, and the media quoted unidentified NASA insiders saying that the first history-making step was still up for grabs. Thinking it best to clear the air, I went to Neil. “You know I don’t care one way or another, but we need to settle this matter before it gets blown out of proportion and so we can get on with our training.”

  Normally a straight shooter, Neil seemed hesitant and aloof. Finally he looked away from my eyes and said, “Buzz, I realize the historical significance of all this, and I just don’t want to rule anything out right now.”

  About ten days later, Deke Slayton came by and said, matter-of-factly, “Neil will be the first one out of the LM.” Ostensibly the decision to have Neil go out first was made for practical, logical reasons. After a number of simulated practice exits, it was determined that it was easier for the man on the left, closest to the hatch, to go out first. That was Neil. When we tried to do it otherwise in practice, it required that we change places, and that I move to the left. When wearing pressurized suits and helmets with the large life-support backpacks, it was not impossible for me to exit the cramped lunar module first, but it was difficult if not downright dangerous, since we would run more risk of bumping into sensitive equipment inside the LM or banging the sensitive equipment in our backpacks. When Deke Slayton asked Neil his opinion on the matter, Neil said that from a technical standpoint it was preferable for the left crewman to egress first. That pretty much settled it.

  TO ANSWER DR. FLINN’S question, certainly it was difficult and sometimes awkward to be known as “the second man on the moon,” especially when, according to usual NASA protocol, I would normally have been first. Even more so, when one considers that I was a mere twenty minutes behind Neil. But although I was an intense competitor, I wanted to be a team player, too. I certainly was not jealous of Neil. Dr. Flinn helped me to sort through many of my thoughts about the ramifications of my being the second man on the moon.

  He also helped me work through everything from my unfulfilled desires to become an Air Force general to my competitiveness with Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. Frank and I had been rivals since our days at West Point together. He graduated one class ahead of me, and we both became jet pilots. In the Air Force, I’d edged Frank out for a couple of honors, and I don’t think he ever forgot it.

  On Apollo 8, Frank was the commander and I was the lunar module pilot in the backup crew. The mission was a bold move to help us step up the clock and get us closer to landing on the moon. Apollo 8 marked the first time that human beings had broken away completely from Earth’s gravitational pull to fly around the moon. I could honestly say that any competition I felt with Frank fell away like the giant shards of frost breaking off the Saturn V rocket as it lifted Frank and his crew—Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—on their way toward the moon. Frank’s mission was one of the most observed in history, the first mission to orbit the moon, as well as one of the most colorful, with the controversial and inspired Christmas Eve reading of Genesis, and the Christmas Day declaration by Jim Lovell, once they knew they were on their way home, “Houston, please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.”

  It wasn’t until fifteen years later that I would discover by accident that I was not NASA’s first choice for the Apollo 11 mission. I stumbled into this revelation when I was hired as a technical consultant for a movie produced by Mary Tyler Moore’s company, MTM. While reading the script, I noticed that after Apollo 8 came back from circling the moon, Frank Borman was offered the commandership of the first lunar landing.

  “Where did you guys get this?” I asked the writers.

  “Out of Frank Borman’s book,” they replied confidently.

  I checked out Frank’s book, Countdown, and sure enough, he writes that in effect it was his decision not to be on the first lunar landing. I approached Jim Lovell, with whom I had flown on Gemini 12, and who had also been on Apollo 8 along with Bill Anders. “Jim, is there anything to this?”

  “Yes, they offered the first landing mission to Frank Borman and he turned it down,” Jim confided, “without asking the other two crew members, Bill and me.”

  Why would Frank not want to be on the first lunar landing mission? I don’t know; maybe he recognized that the public pressure on that first group would be unprecedented, or perhaps, like me, he was more interested in the subsequent missions on which more advanced scientific exploration would take place. Regardless, to me that illustrated the sort of gamesmanship that went on at NASA during those early years of the Apollo program. It seemed that everyone was vying for position.

  Dr. Flinn understood the NASA system as well as any doctor on earth, and he helped me understand the reasons for my anxiety while I was there and especially afterward. He also helped me grapple with the uncertainties I was feeling about the book project I was working on with Wayne Warga.

  OUR HOME IN Hidden Hills, for as much as I enjoyed it, was both a blessing and a curse. It was a fantastic playground for our family, yet I worried how we were going to pay for it. The pressure to keep life functioning normally for my family members weighed heavily on me.

  Following my retirement, I kept busy by working around the house, being Mr. Handyman, while constantly looking for new opportunities to do something significant with my life that would also encourage others to do the same. And I was spending hundreds of hours in interviews with Wayne from the spring of 1972 well into 1973, rehashing my past, especially on the events since the Apollo 11 splashdown. Wayne chugged cups of coffee, and I matched him with Scotch on the rocks.

  Although we mentioned my being inebriated in several stories in the book, it never occurred to me that I might have a drinking problem. Almost everyone I knew drank alcohol in some measure, astronauts included. The only astronauts who didn’t drink while I was a part of NASA were Alan Bean and Bill Anders. For me, drinking was not a problem; it was simply something I did to relax. At least that’s what I told myself.

  When my father found out that I was writing a book, he was nearly apoplectic—especially when he learned that I wanted to tell the real story, about how not all astronauts were Boy Scouts or altar boys. Not everything was always well and good at NASA. But what concerned him most was my intention to reveal more information about how and why I had sought out psychiatric help for my own problems. Soldiers didn’t do that—especially Aldrin soldiers. But I had, and I was glad that I had done so. Thanks to the doctors with whom I had worked at Wilford Hall, I at least recognized the signs of a depressive period coming on me, and could take some steps to fend it off.

  Part of my father’s concern related to how the good people at Mutual of Omaha might view me now that the news was public that I had sought help. Dad wrote letters to me frequently during this period, and in each letter he asked in a poignant, pleading tone, “Son, are you still on the board at Mutual?” His fears were not unfounded.

  With each letter, Dad expressed increasing concern. On July 24 he wrote, “Are you on the Mutual of Omaha Board? Did you have to get off for a period? What about the response by the USAF?”

  By October 27 my father was no longer camouflaging his concerns. In that letter he asked straightforwardly, “Will your book handicap your activity, like Mutual of Omaha?”

  Despite my father’s concerns and objections, in the fall of 1973 my first book, Return to Earth, was published by Random House. We launched the book tour with an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, one of the popular talk shows of the time, and then a press conference at the Good Housekeeping Institute—of all places. In light of the exposure of my extramarital affair in the book, Good Housekeeping was putting its seal of approval and goodie-two-shoes-image on the line. But the book ended on a positive note with Joan and me back together, so perhaps that made it more tolerable to the wholesome organization that had then, and still has today, one of the highest ratings of consumer confidence.

  I had worked for more than a year on the book, describing my adjustment to life on Earth after having attained the goal of reaching
the moon. Joan had forgiven me for my infidelity, and still hoped that “the old Buzz” would return once I was “well.” She even went along with me on the tour to help promote the book. Before long we received overtures about a possible deal in the works to do a television movie, so although Joan and I still weren’t functioning well as a married couple, we were at least together. Indeed, we could have been fine, but for my recurring bouts of depression that led to drinking too much alcohol, which led to further depression. It was a downward spiral.

  I wasn’t obnoxious when I drank; I did, however, feel less inhibited. Drinking relaxed me, imparting an almost euphoric sense of wellness. I didn’t realize that I was not impressing other people that way at all. I drank mostly at home, but occasionally I would go out to a bar and sit there drinking and talking with people until it was time to close and I had to go home. When I drank at night, I often woke up the next day with a hangover, and I soon discovered that the best cure for that horrible morning-after feeling was another drink. That is addiction.

  Looking back, I see that Joan was a good woman who had to put up with a lot. It is devastating enough for any woman to learn that her husband has been having an affair and wants to marry the “other woman.” When a husband is supposed to be a hero and a role model, and he reveals his infidelity in a book, how does a woman cope with that? We had been married for eighteen years when I started working on the book. Joan was uneasy about telling the entire story from the beginning, but when she read the details about Marianne, it was even more difficult for her. She really didn’t want me to write it—she had grown accustomed, since the moon landing, to fighting for every bit of privacy we could maintain in our lives. Fortunately, Wayne Warga handled the information so tactfully and tastefully that Joan found it more palatable.

  When we went out on the book tour, however, the painful reality hit even harder, as reporters and talk-show hosts asked probing questions. In some ways it forced Joan to sort out her feelings and to verbalize how she felt. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Joan admitted that when she learned about my unfaithfulness, her first reaction was to go off and have an affair herself. “But I didn’t know how,” she said. “Even when confronted with the opportunity I didn’t know what to do.”

  Joan almost made my infidelity sound as though it was her fault— which of course it wasn’t. “As for his casual affairs, I had played ostrich. He was gone a lot and I was always involved in amateur theater and I didn’t think about it. I just didn’t know. I may have suspected, and I guess maybe my philosophy was, ‘Is he any different from any other man who travels and received adulation?’ I had married an engineer and here he was a hero.”10

  Joan mustered great courage in facing those interviews; she was convinced our marriage could still be saved. “My big immediate goal is cementing the relationship between Buzz and me…. We now have a far more open and honest relationship than ever before. In a way, when things blew up, it was a tremendous relief. I think we’re going to make it. I really do. And I couldn’t say that for a long time. I didn’t know if I could overcome the bitterness, but I think now that we have a good chance.”11

  But reality poked holes in the bubble of Joan’s idealism. Our relationship was being compromised by alcohol, compounded by my blue funks, and neither of us was yet aware of it.

  After the book tour, I still didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had to find some way to make a living.

  Many Americans assumed that all of the astronauts received huge sums of money for their services, or came out of the program as rich men and women. Not so. While a few astronauts parlayed their fame into wonderfully lucrative careers, most of us walked away with little more money than we had at the beginning. In addition to my regular Air Force salary, which was my source of income while an astronaut, I received $16,000 during the first year as part of a prearranged NASA contract with Life magazine, to publish exclusively all of the astronauts’ stories. The royalties were split evenly with all the astronauts, so, the more people in the program, the less money each of us received. The second year I got a check for $6,000, the following year, $3,060, and less than that the year I walked on the moon. Now, retired from the Air Force, I wondered, How am I going to earn a living? I didn’t know. The Volkswagen commercial had provided the money we needed to get into our home, but those kinds of deals don’t come along every day. I served on the board of a small firm dealing with supervisory electronics, but that income was not sufficient to take care of my family, either. More than money, what I needed was a cause, a calling, a new challenge.

  What I really wanted was a new role in space exploration, but nothing significant arose, at least as far as I could see. When I was working with Wayne Warga on my first book, I had plenty of time to realize just how integrally my life was interconnected with space, since so little activity was going on in space exploration during that time. We launched Skylab in 1973; we sent people to it in ′73 and ′74. Then, in 1975, we cooperated with the Russians in Apollo Soyuz. Much to my chagrin, space exploration was dead; I felt somewhat lifeless, too.

  Disingenuous reporters described me as suffering from mental illness. Today that would not even raise an eyebrow, but in 1973–74, those words held the power to ground any career, no matter how highflying it had been.

  In retrospect, being so forthcoming in Return to Earth may have worked against me. Shortly after the book appeared in print, Mutual of Omaha’s chairman of the board, V. J. Skutt, asked me to resign, saying I was no longer a good figurehead for the company. Although I intended for my story to encourage people dealing with similar conditions to seek help, it also branded me as a philanderer and as a person who was mentally ill, in a constant battle with depression. Neither label was accurate, but I felt that despite the misconceptions, it was worth putting everything out on the table so people could deal with it and so I could move on with my life. Most of the public response to the book was wonderfully positive, although some people had difficulty accepting that an American astronaut and hero could be vulnerable to depression.

  Although my honest and straightforward disclosure in the book proved damaging to me in some ways, it provided hope and inspiration to many other people—especially men, who, in the mid-seventies, were not accustomed to admitting that they struggled with depression. Everywhere I went, men thanked me for bringing the issue to the forefront. “I’ve never been able to admit that I needed it before,” some guys told me, “but thanks to your example, I’m seeking help.”

  To me, that made the revelations in the book worthwhile, even though my father was appalled.

  Nevertheless, after the original op-ed came out in the Los Angeles Times in 1972 about my hospitalization for depression, I was asked to serve on the board of directors of the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH). I was delighted to participate if my celebrity could help shed light on the subject. NASA probably did not see it that way, but I didn’t mind.

  Then, after Return to Earth came out and made such a splash, I was invited to serve as the 1974 national chairman for a one-year term, thanks to a suggestion by Bill Perry, NAMH’s communication director. Bill had read my book, and wanted to know if I was serious when I closed the story by saying that I wanted to stand up and be counted as a person who has had to deal with depression and mental health issues. Bill worked with me to set up a series of appearances as the NAMH chairman to speak to mental health groups across the country, and the first one was to take place in Detroit. We became good friends, and we traveled together frequently for NAMH. My role was to attract a crowd to mental health events, and part of Bill’s job was to promote the events and arrange media interviews for me while we were in town.

  Bill was impressed by my high energy, but he had no idea how serious my own depression and drinking were until he spent seven days at our home in Hidden Hills. He had come out to accompany me in making some planned public appearances on behalf of NAMH, but while Bill was visiting, I fell into a funk in
which I didn’t get out of bed for four straight days.

  When I did get up that week, I drank a fifth of Scotch or Jack Daniel’s each day, and during that time somehow we misplaced four cars. I’d park a car, then we’d go off and do something, and I couldn’t remember where I had parked. We temporarily lost my little red Saab sports car, a Ford Ranchero that my daughter Jan used to pick up hay for her horse, and even a pop-top Volkswagen camper! Eventually we found the vehicles, but it did cause Bill real concern. He recognized that I drank far more than most people, but could still function, seemingly with my faculties relatively unimpaired.

  Bill was with me in Minneapolis when we got together with Princess Margaret of Great Britain. After an evening function, we were in a bar around midnight having a drink with Dave Zigenhaugen, the executive director of the Mental Health Association in Minneapolis. “It’s nice to have two celebrities in town,” Dave said.

  With several drinks already in me, I looked at Dave impishly and said, “Two? Who’s the other one?”

  “Princess Margaret.”

  “Oh, I know her,” I said. “I met her on the world tour after the Apollo 11 moon landing. I’d like to see her.”

  “Well, she’s leaving in a day or two, so I doubt that would be possible,” Dave said.

  “Of course, it’s possible,” I replied. I had an idea. Somewhere around midnight, I started calling the Minnesota governor’s mansion, trying to get someone who could set up a meeting with Princess Margaret. The next morning I was doing a television interview at 8:00 a.m., and while I was on the set, Bill received a telephone call from the governor’s office, informing us that the Princess would see me. We met with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden at 11:00 a.m. that morning, and it became a big story in Minneapolis. Bill was duly impressed.